P.A. Semi introduces PWRficient chip lineup
You know how we love a gadget underdog story, so without reminding us too much of Transmeta, we're already a little in love with P.A. Semi, the "new" processor company that bided their time for two years before announcing their first product this week, the PWRficient multi-core 64-bit microprocessor. Their first PWRficient chips will supposedly run at 2GHz, but use only between five to 13 watts of juice (to, say, the 20-25 estimated watts of a 2GHz Pentium M) and apparently make use of the IBM Power instruction set (i.e. will be theoretically compatible with PowerPC chips). We know they've got to be a bit bummed that they just lost a huge potential deal with Apple since they're switching to Intel (it's not far fetched to postulate that the PWRficient might well have been the chip that succeeded the G5 in PowerBooks with Power), but the company's headed up by Dan Dobberpuhl, the same man who helmed DEC's Alpha CPU dev team and SiByte, so we assume dude's got some serious business up his sleeves and didn't come this far to worry too much about where Apple plans on taking the Power architecture.
[Via Forbes]
